Posts Tagged ‘Republicans as cancer’

In mid-December 2015, Congress passed a 2,000-plus-page omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2016. Both parties were quick to declare victory after the passage of the $1.8 trillion package. White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters “we feel good about the outcome, primarily because we got a compromise budget agreement that fought off a wide variety of ideological riders.” The office of House Speaker Paul J. Ryan touted the bill’s “64 billion for overseas contingency operations” for, among other things, assisting ”European countries facing Russian aggression.”
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Whether White House spokesman Josh Earnest was referring, in part, to the Conyers-Yoho amendment as one of those “ideological riders” the administration fought to defeat is unclear. What is clear is that by stripping out the anti-neo-Nazi provision, Congress and the administration have paved the way for US funding to end up in the hands of the most noxious elements circulating within Ukraine today.

Like this:

For a while now, Norm Ornstein’s been edging away from the GOP and its increasing levels of insanity, intolerance and greed. Now, he’s gone and nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Schloßkirche:

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

Welcome to the Hermetic Order of the Shrill, Norm. Paul Krugman’s here to teach you the secret handshake.

— FDL: President Obama correctly calls Walker’s and WI GOP’s actions “an assault on unions.” This is especially true since, by making all sorts of giveaways to his rich buddies, Walker created the budget problem he’s now claiming that only union-busting will solve.

Well, well, well. It looks as if Tony Sutton, who we last saw talking trash about Minnesota Supreme Court judges such as former Chief Justice Eric Magnuson, and who went oddly silent once Magnuson was hired for the recount by Tom Emmer’s legal team, has managed to get away from his handlers again and is babbling something about planned legal action to end the week:

“We are exploring filing some papers tomorrow and we will talk more about the specifics tomorrow,” Party chairman Tony Sutton said Thursday night.

The scuttlebutt is that the alleged legal filing Sutton threatens may exist only as a way for him to control the news cycle heading into the weekend — there’s nothing going on as yet to rate any sort of filing, much less one that justifies having all of the Minnesota media camped breathlessly outside the Toddler’s playpen office waiting for him to throw them some scraps. My legal contacts are scratching their heads over this — and wondering how long somebody as stand-up as Eric Magnuson will tolerate being associated with what looks to be silly grandstanding and frivolity.

My own guess is that this is, along with an attempt to dominate the news cycle, an effort to distract the local media from other, more pressing issues and actions. I’m wondering what sort of hanky-panky is going on that this trick of the Toddler’s is meant to distract us from noticing?

The McCain strategy is now apparent: flood the world with so much bulls–t that no one can see their way to walk to the voting booth.

The boots that AKMuckraker uses to wade through Palin’s lies over at Mudflats

The latest wingnut meme, called out by Barry Ritholtz and Hale Stewart is that the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) caused the mortgage crisis. The heart of this stupidity is Thomas Sowell’s claim that CRA forces banks to lend to unqualified minority borrowers.

This is so completely stupid that it almost leaves one speechless. Here are the points that Robert Gordon at TAP raised months ago:
1. CRA has been around since 1977 without any problems. Mid-1990s changes in the law caused a flurry of CRA activity, but that died out by 2001.
2. CRA doesn’t force banks to lend to anyone. It requires them to lend from neighborhoods in which they accept deposits.
3. Most subprime loans were not originated at banks.
4. Also, Fannie and Freddie’s problems were actually caused by Alt-A, not subprime loans.

I keep telling AKMuckraker that she needs taller boots to handle the McCain-Palin Republican Party.